20 Content Promotion Strategies To Make Your Content More Visible
You have written a compelling blog post. It conveys your organization’s key messages, speaks eloquently to your target audience, and is backed by current facts and figures. Here is the thing, unless you can get the right eyes on that blog, it is useless — and all your hard work was for nothing.
Although the business world recognizes the value of content production, there is still a lack of understanding surrounding the content promotion. In fact, only 12% of marketing professionals think their content is targeting the right audience with relevant content. Content promotion is the answer. The right tactics and tools will help you cast as wide a net as possible when disseminating content, but they will also ensure that you reach the right audience with that content.
Key Learnings
If you search for this on the Internet, you’ll find that people are very creative and they come up with ideas that seem good at the beginning but they are either too hard to follow or they don’t generate the expected results.
Instead of wasting your time on unproven methods, create a simple content promotion plan and incorporate all methods described above. They are highly effective and proven to generate great results over and over again.
It has to be valuable to users because they learned something new or because they got an answer to their question and at the same time it has to be something that other bloggers would love to mention in their articles.
Alex Chris is a digital marketing consultant, author, and instructor. He has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing. Alex holds an MSc Degree in eCommerce and has consulted with Fortune 500 companies in different industries. He blogs regularly about SEO and Digital marketing, and his work has been referenced by leading marketing websites. Connect with Alex on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Earned media tactics
Earned media promotion targets influencers and authoritative websites to forge a partnership that could manifest itself in several different ways: guest posts, contents, and much more. As SEOs, you’re likely most familiar with this type of promotion.
Influencer marketing
Influencers are the industry’s experts. They’re the folks who have already nurtured large audiences and have the megaphones to reach those audiences. They’re the ones everyone you’re trying to reach is already listening to. Developing relationships with these influencers is particularly effective for marketers who are still trying to build their own brand recognition and notoriety. Working with these thought leaders is also a strong catalyst for SEO campaigns because of their ability to put your content in front of the right eyes — people who are likely to share your content, visit your site, and eventually convert. If you’ve done your planning right, you can actually include influencer marketing as part of your content creation process.
Use the tips above and in this guide from Fractl on how to identify influencers for your brand. Once you’ve identified the influencers you’d like to reach out to, it’s time to make the connection. This is an art within itself, and it’s well explained in this evergreen Whiteboard Friday video from Rand.
Content partnerships: Guest posting, contests, etc.
Your content doesn’t have to only live on your site. With content partnerships, you create unique content campaigns for another site with a related audience but a bigger reach. Some common examples of content partnerships are guest posts, contests or giveaways, and collaborative guides or assets. Despite the differences between these tactics, the primary focus of each of these should be to grow your audience. Working with third-party websites can yield great links passing on authority, but that should never be your singular objective. You should aim for these websites to attract potential customers who can impact your business.
Content partnerships have gotten a bad rap because of the way a lot of people were going about them — putting up whatever garbage content they could on any site with a semi-decent Domain Authority just to get links.
But partnerships (done well) can be a super-powerful tactic to build your authority and expand your audience. While guest posts, contests, and collaborative content can all be a similar process to set up, deciding which specific tactic to take depends on your objectives.
When you’re deciding who to partner with, focus on finding credible sites related to your industry that will give you your own byline. You can tell it’s a good site if you’d be proud to send the link to your boss (and not just because it’s a link). Then, write interesting and unique content that will encourage people to seek out more content from you.
One thing to keep in mind with any of these initiatives is to follow Google’s guidelines regarding paid links. As SEOs, many of us may have witnessed firsthand the pain of a manual linking penalty (you’ve at least heard enough about these on Twitter) to stay far away from any risks.
What is content promotion?
1. Inform your subscribers via email
If this step is not applicable to you because you don’t have an email list yet, then this is a HUGE mistake. Email marketing is applicable to ALL kinds of businesses and starting an email list is an important first step.
2. Share on social media networks (multiple times)
Sharing your content on your social media networks has a number of benefits. While it is true that organic reach in all networks is decreasing over time, there are still some good reasons to go through this process.
3. Tag websites mentioned in your content
To achieve this, you first need to strategically mention or link to websites that have social media influence in your content and then tag them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to let them know about it.
4. Email bloggers mentioned in your content
It turns out that other bloggers follow the same approach when you link out to them and this not only helps to promote your current content but over time you’ll end up with a list of people that will be happy to promote your new content as well.
5. Run paid ads on Facebook (Retargeting)
When you run your first retargeting campaign you’ll notice that the number of post interactions (likes, shares, comments) and site visits will be more than your expectations. This is because your retargeting audience is people from your community that already know and trust your brand.
6. Run paid ads on Facebook (New Audience)
Try different versions of your ad in the same campaign – Don’t use the ‘boost post’ feature of FB but create a new campaign and 2-3 ads targeting the same post but with different headings/wording.
Optimize your campaigns for landing page views and not interactions – When creating your Ad Set make sure that you select ‘Landing page views’ as the optimization method and not interactions. This way you’ll pay FB when a visitor actually visits your website.
In terms of budget, start with a low budget and keep the campaigns running for a few days and then analyze the results. If there is interaction with your ads, test more ad variations to find out what is the best combination of headlines/message for the particular content.
7. Add to your home page and main blog page
Hint: If you don’t already have a section on your homepage to display your latest blog posts or new content then this is a great time to change your homepage and add it. Look at my homepage as an example.
Add a link to your main blog page – This is the norm for most websites but in case it’s not for your site, you need to make sure that your new content appears in the main blog page as well.
Add to your sidebar widget – If you are using a sidebar on your site, then a good idea is to add a ‘Recent Posts’ widget to have your latest posts listed there. To make it more appealing to the eye, you can also add a NEW label to help users understand that the particular piece of content was published recently.
8. Add links from existing articles
Link to your new content from existing articles – Having an optimized internal link structure can help your SEO in many ways. It helps both search engines and users find the content they need on your site.
These are great candidates to add internal links to your new post. You don’t need to add a lot of links. Aim to add at least 2-3 links for each post. If you have a number of posts that are highly relevant there is no problem of adding more.
If any of these pages is closely related to the keywords you’re targeting in your new content, then by adding a link, you pass some of the authority of the page (PageRank) to the new page and this will help it rank faster in the organic search results.
Key Learnings
If you search for this on the Internet, you’ll find that people are very creative and they come up with ideas that seem good at the beginning but they are either too hard to follow or they don’t generate the expected results.
Instead of wasting your time on unproven methods, create a simple content promotion plan and incorporate all methods described above. They are highly effective and proven to generate great results over and over again.
It has to be valuable to users because they learned something new or because they got an answer to their question and at the same time it has to be something that other bloggers would love to mention in their articles.
Alex Chris is a digital marketing consultant, author, and instructor. He has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing. Alex holds an MSc Degree in eCommerce and has consulted with Fortune 500 companies in different industries. He blogs regularly about SEO and Digital marketing, and his work has been referenced by leading marketing websites. Connect with Alex on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Resources:
https://www.semrush.com/blog/content-promotion/
https://www.reliablesoft.net/content-promotion/#:~:text=What%20is%20content%20promotion?%20Content%20promotion%20is%20the,social%20media%20shares,%20backlinks,%20leads,%20conversions,%20and%20sales.
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-content-marketing/content-promotion
https://www.reliablesoft.net/content-promotion/
https://buffer.com/resources/content-promotion/